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Anti-Kremlin Rallies End in Violence

April 16, 2007 09:51 AM

by
findingDulcinea Staff

Weekend protests by anti-Kremlin groups in Moscow and St. Petersburg lead to clashes with riot police and the arrest of former chess champion Garry Kasparov; government opposition promises to unify in response.

Saturday, April 14, Moscow––About 700 demonstrators gathered to denounce what they see as the government’s restrictions on political freedom.

Riot police and militia responded, numbering in their thousands. They blocked the march between Pushkin Square and Turgenev Square, and employed batons to break up the rally.

Police arrested dozens, including former world chess champion, turned political activist, Garry Kasparov. Kasparov is the founder of the group that organized the protests. The Other Russia is a coalition of disparate political parties united in their stance against the Putin Administration.

On Sunday, the protests spread to St. Petersburg, where up to 2,000 demonstrators took to the streets. As in Moscow, the marchers set off without government authorization. Again riot police responded, and the rally ended with violence and multiple arrests.

The Financial Times quoted a Kremlin-connected political analyst. “This is going to escalate,” Sergei Markov said. “Both sides are going to toughen their position.”

Although commentators have suggested that opposition to President Vladimir Putin may now grow, the Russian premier enjoys over 70% approval ratings. The population feels that he has provided stability, preventing the country’s return to the chaos that arose during President Boris Yeltsin’s tenure.

Garry Kasparov became the youngest ever world chess champion in 1985, and in the last years of the Soviet system was a vocal critic of the Communist government. He retired from chess in 2005 to concentrate on his political activism. He is the founder of The Other Russia, a coalition of disparate anti-Putin groups.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in 1952 in Leningrad. For almost two decades, he worked in the KGB, and became president of the Russian Federation in 1999. He is serving his second term as president, which the constitution determines must be his last.

In 2006, at the founding conference of The Other Russia, a statement was made to the G–7 countries. It claimed that the Russian authorities had conspired against the conference delegates, who “were arrested in airports, others removed from trains en route … Opposition members are being detained without any reason, physically abused, and drugs and explosives planted on them.”

The head of the Russian government is the prime minister, who is chosen by the president of the Russian Federation, currently Vladimir Putin. The president also retains direct control over the “presidential bloc,” a number of federal ministries and agencies that include the interior and defense ministries.

The International News Safety Institute (INSI) published a report in May 2007 titled “Killing the Messenger,” looking at violence against journalists between 1996 and 2006. Its findings showed that Russia is second only to Iraq in terms of the number of journalists to have been killed during that period.

In 2006, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists published a report stating that 13 Russian journalists had been murdered since Putin came to power. Only three of those cases resulted in arrests and trials. “But, even then, prosecutions have fallen short of convictions.”

On March 13, 2007 both houses of the Russian parliament rejected a U.S. human rights report on Russia. Lawmakers stated that they viewed “the report as interference in Russia’s internal affairs … and as an unfriendly act capable of provoking extremist sentiments, and categorically opposes the accusations against Russia as ungrounded.”

The Other Russia unites unlikely allies on the right and left towards one goal: to find a candidate to win the 2008 presidential election. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Kasparov says that he does not expect Putin to defy the constitution and run for a third term, but that his “mentality is just to run away––with all the Russian billionaires.”

There have been calls for a change in the Russian constitution to allow Putin to stand for a third presidential term in 2008. The president has publicly rejected those suggestions, but Russian journalist Deliya Melyanova believes those demurrals “only bring a third term closer.”

April 17, 2007––The Kremlin admitted that the police response to the anti-government protests was disproportionate. "I think some overreaction really took place, but their main role was to ensure law and order on the streets," Deputy Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Reuters.